WILDWOOD
2026
Directed by Travis Knight
Written by Chris Butler (based on the novel by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis)
Laika has never really been a for-profit business—the company (previously the Will Vinton Studios) was acquired for Travis Knight by his father, billionaire Phil Knight, as a way to turn his son's passion for stop-motion animation into a vocation—but you could be forgiven for thinking there still must've been limits to how much of a money sink it could be. Since 2019, and the really rough box office performance of Missing Link, the studio was silent for years, and it looked as if the Laika experiment might be over. But in September 2021, Knight announced that there was a forthcoming project, called Wildwood, and I figured if it ever actually happened, I'd hear about it. Five years and a month later, it arrived in theaters, to some extent intended to demonstrate limits don't apply to him, being directed by Knight himself (he has become a quasi-established director in both stop-motion and live-action), and as expensive as Missing Link in nominal dollars, if its $100 million price tag is to be believed (though Laika doesn't have the same financial reporting requirements most studios do), and looking more expensive, by a lot, on top of being a downright-intimidating 131 minutes long (hence the longest Laika film by twenty-nine, hence why it can't possibly share a cost figure with a 92-minute, smaller-scaled film made seven years ago) in Knight's pursuit of epic-sized fantasy.
It also begins with a scene from the novel it's adapting (Wildwood is unequivocally the biggest pile of text that Laika has ever adapted), and while I don't believe the novel begins with it, you can see why the Laika film might: it concerns the young son of its villainess, who has just discovered that he's not a real boy, though he must have previously believed he was, considering that what he does upon this discovery, in the midst of weeping black oil tears in the direction of his distraught mother, who'd built the boy with a combination of forbidden technology and occult knowledge, is to smash open his own chest, and tear out the gear where his heart ought to be before diving off his balcony to his destruction. Needless to say, a loaded image for a stop-motion animation studio to be kicking their movie off with, so loaded, in fact, that it's tantalizingly addling what it could "mean"—simultaneously, the filmmakers are the witch, bringing the boy to life in their bid to tell their stories and make you feel feelings, and they are the witch's work, ripping their hearts out for a very particular and not very popular artform, contemplating the mechanism in their hands while they plummet to their deaths. You can easily see how evocative that would be to somebody who'd dedicated their life to imparting the illusion of life to their little dolls—Knight grabbed ahold of the novel Wildwood almost immediately upon its publication in 2011—and there's a keener feeling to it now, when we have to wonder if nothing's truly without limit, and if this scene now comes first because Wildwood has been intended, in the alternative scenario where it didn't make any money either, as Laika's last hurrah, one last run with the passion project Knight had been hoping to make for fourteen years and hadn't yet because he always knew it would be the most time-and-cost-intensive and Laika wasn't supposed to be an financial black hole. This prologue is also the most interesting sequence in the entire film, though a little later, background signage on a storefront back in the "real" world makes the pitch a lot more articulately and a lot less elegantly, something to the effect of "handcrafted art: get it while it's still around," and it's a pretty repulsive appeal to your pity.
As for whether the "alternative" (i.e., the conventional) scenario, of Wildwood being a financial failure, is playing out now, there actually is a lot of pity for this animation studio amongst the cartoon-enjoyers—I have a great deal myself—and, despite its slow start, only time will tell. Not that it matters presently. Pity can move me to a theater, but it doesn't mean I'm going to lie about it. If I'm suggesting there are people lying about Wildwood out there, to you or to themselves—well, if they use phrases like "handcrafted" and "art" a lot, yes, they probably are. Wildwood is okay, and anyone telling you it's impressive isn't lying, though the blatant indulgence of its production has introduced weaknesses to it that should've been extremely easy for any clear-eyed filmmaker to get rid of long before they got animated, yet obviously such a filmmaker was not in command here; on this count, it had Knight, by all reports a talented animator (and good manners dictate I offer him a measure of gratitude for making it all possible in the first place), but my personal opinion has always been that he's Laika's worst director. The only previous Laika movie I haven't loved, Kubo and the Two Strings, came under Knight's direction (while, for that matter, his live-action Transformers spin-off Bumblebee is the kind of movie whose bland mediocrity renders it more horrible than a "worse" movie would be).
Wildwood confirms the impression. There aren't really a lot of individually terrible decisions—which is not to say there are none; there's at least one extraordinarily bad one, very early on and helping set or rather mangle his movie's tone, with a Decembrists song* that is precisely wrong for the nightmarish thriller setpiece Knight is trying to put over, bizarrely upbeat and poppy, imposing to no small degree an upbeat poppiness onto this chase, and we'll get into details later, but the chase concerns a black cloud of crows who've snatched up an infant child from his caretaker, possibly to consume him, so you can see how "upbeat, poppy" would not be appropriate—but mostly it's not wretched fuck-ups like this, mostly it's just how the story feels like it has to be forced through molasses to get anywhere, either because of how it's reflecting the novel's self-evident complexity in a form where it feels like that complexity has been slopped onto a very simple and straightforward fairy tale for no reason, or because Knight is being actively repetitive and dragging the pace down this way instead, notably the way his villainess looks at a child and, in his face, hallucinates the son she lost all those years ago, and this happens twice, and this isn't even the child she's sacrificing to bring her son back. Then again, Chris Butler wrote the script, and I've generally accorded Butler (he co-wrote and co-directed ParaNorman, and did both jobs solo on Missing Link) the status of Laika's most valuable talent; I'd prefer to think Butler was overruled time and again, but who knows, maybe it's as much his fault.
Well, I've somewhat started summarizing the plot, but the story properly begins in Portland, OR, another way this feels like a magnum opus, or a potential swan song, for Portland, OR-based Laika. In Portland lives thirteen year-old Prue McKeel (short for "Progeria," or maybe it's "Prudence"; Peyton Elizabeth Lee), with her hippie mother and father (Maya Erskine and Jake Johnson), whose groovy ways she rebels against without seriously contradicting their values—she is irritated to be asked to water the plant ([they're] people too")—and with her baby brother, Mac (Arthur Knight, which is adorable, though the name "Mac McKeel" is not). When it comes to her brother, her parents' authoritarian streak comes out, with one seemingly-arbitrary but paramount rule—Prue is never to take him outside.
This day, however, Prue breaks that rule, taking the tyke with her on a bike ride through the town, and all seems well, Wildwood spending a solid five or even six minutes establishing its kid's adventure quotidian baseline, or at least thinking that it is—to call it "a Portlandia sketch" would give it too much credit, but it'd give you the gist—while also using this opportunity to glom annoying loser Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) onto Prue, just in time for those crows I mentioned to alight on the playground they're in, and swarm the baby. In hot pursuit, Prue (and, by accident, Curtis) cross the St. Johns Bridge into Linnton, a realm of fearsome magic and high adventure.
That's not correct: this is the Impassable Wilderness, a feature of the Portland area widely-known enough for Curtis to also call it by name, and it appears the book explains this better, but it's best to let a movie have its way in its first fifteen minutes, even if in the movie the Impassable Wilderness is accessed by a bridge with commuter rail traffic on it. Nonetheless, entry into the Wilderness itself should not be possible, but Prue—with Curtis still in tow—enters anyway, the overgrown barrier of ivy mysteriously giving way. Inside, they stumble across the discombobulating scene of a troop of bipedal coyotes dressed (and armed) like 19th century grenadiers; discovered, the coyotes give chase, and Curtis heroically distracts them so Prue can escape, so for her part Prue gets picked up by the mailman and delivered to the ineffective leadership of bourgeois South Wood, whereupon she has to escape their clutches, while Curtis is captured and rendered to the leader of the coyote army, the rebel governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan)—whom we referred to a little while ago when we mentioned a witch obsessed with resurrecting her son, which didn't work out before, but she's doubled-down on her black magic since then, and we've figured out a while before Curtis does that she kidnapped little Mac (indeed, we'll have figured out a little while before Prue does, what Alexandra's preexisting relationship to little Mac must be), and with this baby's blood she's going to have her son back. Things come to a head in a great battle to save the Wilderness and her brother.
If I trailed off slightly there, it's because the plot of Wildwood gets laborious, though I'm not sure it wasn't laborious already—I noted that its first act is intensely concerned with hurrying things up, but it sure feels like a lot of waiting afterwards. I cannot really say it's "damaging" that the quotidian set-up is rushed, given that not rushing it would've just involved more Curtis, probably infodumping even more boring facts about his D&D-style crap, despite verbalized disinterest from his conversation partner; it's tricky to write a character like that, and one of the tricks is not separating him from his straightman, though they do, and for the most part Curtis is leading scenes himself in his own major thread of the film, which means he's only annoying us and not Prue, while we have no ability to reach through the screen and slap his eyeglasses off his face. But then, Prue was only very hypothetically going to be a good straightman to her foil, sufficiently flat as a protagonist (and doing her damnedest to route around Curtis anyway) that not much of a dynamic was ever likely. She gets to lead her thread of the movie, which is still the worse thread of the movie because at least Curtis is with the villain and being inveigled into her dreamland—not an immensely complicated arc, but the only one in the movie, and not as-such "bad" (Curtis, though initially tempted, learns that his fantasies of violence are childish abstractions of the real thing, but subsequently learns that violence is always traumatizing but only wrong until it's substantively right, which does have a refreshing maturity to it), but it's constitutionally prohibited from being "good" when it's delivered by yammering dialogue and Tremblay's hugely unpleasant performance, simultaneously meek and mewlingly insistent.
That's the center of the movie, and the center's not really its problem: Wildwood is a strange and largely-unsuccessful attempt to darken the whimsy of a fairy tale into a story that's grimly "adult"—and outside of isolated moments, I don't think it reaches that anyway—but "adult" in a particularly unwanted way, with that fairy tale channeled through the tropes of a modern high fantasy. Which means FACTIONS. Factions atop of factions; factions within factions; factions factions factions; and it appears to be astoundingly faithful to its 512 page source, but as far the movie goes I have no Goddamn idea what it's here for, or why it was considered useful to the plot of Labyrinth to have political machinations placed into it in every nook and cranny they could possibly go. The machinations are deeply boring on their merits and are headlined by dire proponents: they top out at the ineffective bureaucratic central government that Alexandra is rebelling against—"why isn't the Evil Queen archetype the 'central government?'"; yes, I know—that involves a Wormtongue type who's secretly ruling, but mostly because the actual boss is too stupid to govern, as indicated, e.g., when the latter asks if the phrase Prue's searching for is a "coop day tatt." And that's topping out: the bandit rebels (different rebels than Alexandra's, mind you) are introduced in their prison by screaming at a 13 year-old because he's wearing one of Alexandra's uniforms, which is, surprisingly, not even endearing when that 13 year-old is Curtis. Their personalities don't really develop much from there. Plus, taken literally, the movie comes off as racist against coyotes and crows, who have no stated reason (despite "characters stating interesting reasons for their actions and beliefs" seeming like the entire point of "politics" in a fantasy) to follow evil Alexandra.
Basically almost nobody in the movie is worth spending time with, the exceptions being fairly few—remarkably, one might be Nora Lum (she plays a gross rat), and "one of your cartoon's brightest spots is Awkwafina" is a statistically-improbable phrase—though at least one of these is our sorceress, who's not a villain for the ages, but the one element of hype surrounding Wildwood that's correct is that Mulligan's good, and Alexandra's compelling thanks to her tragedy and the perverse single-mindedness it's given her, so that there's a genuinely delectable malevolence to, for example, listening to her sing a lullaby to her captive baby, and suspect she "means" it with motherly affection, even though the song she's singing is about how she's going to gut him on a plinth. Curiously, I wouldn't even accord Mulligan best-in-show honors, which I'd wind up giving to Johnson, whose performance is either bringing out the subtleties of a screenplay that knows what contemptibly human failures the McKeels are as parents, or he's actually introducing those subtleties in coordination with the best moments of Lee's performance, and dragging the character animators along. (And it could be either, but certain features of this screenplay militate towards the latter: Butler has Prue talk about her ambivalent belief in magic over two hours into a movie that's spent 90% of its time in a land where animals walk and talk,** and where a witch has sent a numberless army of crows after her brother.)
That this is Laika, however, makes a difference, a big one, and still not as big of one as you'd like, or have assumed; and part of that "Travis Knight, bad director" thing is that this is the Laika movie that looks and feels and moves least like any Laika movie to date, even his own. (The "Laikaest" thing about it might be the studio's never-faltering allegiance to a very particular era of rock music, presumably Knight's favorite era of rock music.) It is not altogether that this fantasy moves as completely away as it does from the "kid's horror" that was foundational to this studio's early masterpieces—though it does, and somewhat inexplicably; you would not have to look hard to find somebody claiming to be thrilled what a dark fantasy this is, what a return-with-a-v to kid's movies that'll fuck your kids up, or some similar sentiment, and if you just listed the content of the film (child sacrifice, deals with devils, startling character deaths, onscreen mass-scale violence, and a non-trivial amount of blood) that would seem to make sense, and yet outside of the opening and a subsequent few scenes with Alexandra, I never felt like I was being invited into a dark place or even a particularly dangerous one, possibly because so much of it is frivolous, superfluous, or a combination thereof.
But as for the Laika of it, upon their giant animation tables they have successfully built a woodland, and it amounts to the least atmospheric and interesting-to-look-at of their movies by a fairly huge margin, as if the watchword were to avoid stylization at all costs, when "stylization" has been the studio's principal point of recommendation ever since their earliest days; these woods are some woods, and what isn't woods is still surprisingly dull ("South Wood" is less weird than "Portland") and even the "high fantasy" parts feel like very little spin whatsoever has been placed upon them—some Nutcracker mice here (they're coyotes now, for scaling purposes), some medievalist design there, that aren't terribly fascinating on their own, but the good news is they don't go together very well, either—and if Laika weren't basically the sole major company working in this medium, I don't think you could identify the studio on the basis of the character design principles, a discontinuity that may be explained by the many years of stasis but feels like as wrenching a shift away from "what this studio does" as Atlantis: The Lost Empire was for Disney, but moreso. (Not that it's ever that bad, and if I were to make a Disney comparison, I think The Black Cauldron would be the most appropriate. Not that it's that bad, either.) Anyway, here it's like anti-stylization: there's no way to describe Prue as a "realistic" figure, but there's this sort of runaway stab at realism that everybody signed off on, making her one of the strangest young teens I've ever seen in a cartoon, defined principally by the giant bags under her eyes (and to some extent by some deep brow furrows)—hand to God, it was only about four weeks ago that I realized she was not supposed to be Mac's 40 year-old mother, which I think probably makes a better story so let's not bother imagining it—and it appears to have been to some extent intended to characterize her for us, though it's just inapt; Prue isn't Cinderella, she's not even especially put-upon. (And it may be that my affinity for Prue's sharp-nosed, caricatured dad is partly down to how he's the only figure in the movie that does "look like a Laika character."***)
So barely any style, and 131 minutes to show it off. At least they are showing off; this is, still, objectively the most resource-intensive and advanced piece of animation Laika has ever done. And a lot of that is just resources: a giant battle scene "filmed" in "long takes" with "meticulously arranged lighting" is obviously something stop-motion is capable of, but putting dozens (probably not hundreds—remember Laika is stop-motion assisted by CGI—but, heck, maybe) of individually-animated maquettes into those shots just isn't done, because it's too costly, but it's done here, even if the battle scene is built on pretty uninspiring "the good guys brought knives to a gunfight, but the bad guys obliged them with bayonet charge anyway" staging, and what convolution it gets is a cross-cut "stealth" sequence that's like if Return of the Jedi involved a skin-crawlingly insipid Charlie Day comedy module. But I'm trying to praise the thing: it's got spectacle, in the big and small things (the character animation itself doesn't always have enough to express, but it is expressive in its astonishing fluidity, and there's a much shorter film's worth of legitimately-earned emotional beats scattered throughout this behemoth). The big spectacle can, of course, be amazing, even accidentally tumbling into "style" after all—there's a "let's action this up" remix of the god-tier flight-based opening of The Rescuers Down Under that I suppose pretty inevitably became my favorite scene, and a prison break that becomes a physics puzzle that was even meaningfully production-designed, and a climax involving conscious and belligerent ivy that's awe-inspiring in the amount of overwhelming detail it brings with each little leaf, and of course it's pretty cool what that ivy ultimately does, too—and the whole movie benefits from Dario Marianelli's score, that's all these urgent fiddles and guitars, and still rustic in a way the setting asks for despite being "epic," with very little hyperbole providing the film more of a personality than every design concept and line of dialogue has put together. Wildwood is as brutely watchable as a movie gets, then, a bonfire of cash set aflame to power a story I'm pretty sure I didn't want to hear, but was glad to behold, anyhow.
Score: 6/10
*The novel, Wildwood, was written by Colin Meloy, Decembrists frontman, and his wife (she also provided the illustrations), Carson Ellis. So it's not (presumably) the "there is Decembrists music in this Decembrists-adjacent project" part that's bad.
**Except for the horses, which are horses, which is fucking baffling. Also, was Alexandra's son, like, assassinated by the birds who, evidently, caused his horse to slip on purpose?
***He also has the funniest joke, "Even Western medicine!", which nobody but me laughed at. Sigh.
No comments:
Post a Comment